I picked this book up from Barack Obama’s summer reading list. Whatever you think of his politics, he has a refined taste in books, and he’s never led me to a bad place in his book choices. This work is no different. Ben Lerner guides us along for a shorter story – almost a novella – that unwraps creatively as we go along. Though readers’ curiosities are engaged from the start, the main theme isn’t even well-established until the final chapter. The superb craftsmanship delights readers looking for something different.
Themes of fatherhood, friendship, the trappings of career, and the early days of COVID intertwine in a story opening in Providence, Rhode Island. The narrator loses his phone and cannot record an interview with an older, famous professor. Transcription thus is not possible.
The theory of transcription then unfolds with the professor’s entourage and his son. Though digital recording is not possible, unspoken messaging, with all its imprecisions, floats everywhere. Although we appear to have academic and technological mastery, do we really master our most important communications, as with our immediate family? Do we understand the subtexts of the human heart, or are we trapped in a mode of brute literalism?
Transcription: A Novel
By Ben Lerner
Copyright (c) 2026
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN13 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Genre: Fiction
www.amazon.com